To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.

The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.

A man can make what he wants of himself if he truly believes that he must be ready for hard work and many heartbreaks.

Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.

The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.

It is important that the strongest pressures against the continuation of segregation, North or South, be continually and constantly manifested. Probably, as much as anything else, this is the key in the elimination of discrimination in the United States.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men‘s minds.

We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they’d give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there – and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.

Today’s Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories… We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust… We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.

A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi… has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It’s not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.

We must dissent from the fear.

My father had a flat rule. He believed that every man’s house was his castle. He had a flat rule: no man could come in his house without his permission.

What is the quality of your intent?

The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.

It was taken for granted that we had to make something of ourselves. Not much was said about it; it was just in the atmosphere of the home.

To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.

When you hear a lot of stories about Africa, and you get to a place like Kenya and other countries like that, where they think the same way we do, I was happy to find that the Schedule of Rights that I drew for the Kenyan Government was working very well.

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.